Lives soar on connections - Beads from articles May 24, 2020 to May 30, 2020
I read twenty five or thirty articles a week. In lockdown I have begun a discipline of capturing their essence, pulling a quote and wondering how they might string together.
The beads I have strung together this week orient around three stories of remarkable student achievement and remind us that lives soar because of our capacity to form powerful connections.
Dan Sisson, eighty two years old, retired college history professor, cancer survivor, without any experience as a builder and very little money has nearly completed building an almost full scale replica of Jefferson’s Monticello deep in the forest of Washington State. To get started he told himself - “Either I can learn to do this or I’m a goddamned failure.” (1) Sisson had been schooled “by people who assumed that life would throw up hard and unexpected tests.” (2) Kevin Harrington faced an incredibly hard and unexpected test before his schooling got very far. A broken prosecutorial system wrongly convicted him of murder and sentenced him to life in prison. There he dove into every education opportunity he could create. “In his mind, learning was the closest thing to freedom.“ (3) He took law classes with students who went behind bars to share in learning with inmates. His classmates helped Kevin win exoneration and release from prison. They understood - “The work of solidarity is to close the distance systems have put between us by joining and accepting others as fully human—in our struggles and gifts alike.” (4) “Let us not forget that the wonderment of the classroom, the source of its transformative possibilities, is rooted in the humanity of the people gathered in the same place, at the same time. The best teachers are savants of human transformation because of their capacity to forge powerful connections with their students, inspire their best efforts, and engage them in meaningful and personal ways.” (5) Keith Wallick’s teachers at the the Santee Education Center in South Los Angeles did just that. Keith began 9th grade there, morbidly obese, homeless and completely disinterested in school. “It was hard for Keith to open up to his teachers about his weight, his loneliness or his living situation. But once he did, school officials stepped up. They provided him with a loaded TAP fare card, so he could ride the Blue Line to school. And with that simple gesture, he dropped his guard. Keith got to know his teachers and recognized what caring looked like. Now a high school senior Keith really wants to go to college. “I know I have to go to make myself better,” he says.” (6) It can’t be repeated often enough - love leads to learning and on to lives marked by amazing aspiration and achievement.
(1) Drex Heikes told the inspiring tale of Dan Sisson, his love for Thomas Jefferson’s vision for America and the way that love became a compulsion to build a model Monticello in the LA Times
http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=efbebc87-de3b-4bda-a256-54a5f359dd42
(2) David Brooks bemoaned both the malicious immaturity of Donald Trump and the collapse of educational institutions as agents of moral formation in this NY Times article.
(3) Julia Barajas lifted up the life of Kevin Harrington, recently released after seventeen years imprisoned for a crime he did not commit in the L A Times
http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=5f06d8c1-1da7-4372-ae9e-4bad378a1d8c
(4) Richard Rohr commented all week on the insights captured by Paolo Freire in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. https://cac.org/richard-rohr/daily-meditations/daily-meditations-archive/
(5) Jeremy S. Adams, a classroom teacher forced out of his workplace wrote a lovely testament to the mystery and magic of teaching in the L A Times.
http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=98c31dab-9837-4a7b-934a-5dfd397789c3
(6) Sandy Banks illustrated the truth about the impact of teachers described by Jeremy Adams in her report of Keith Wallick in the L A Times
http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=34a3cb01-bbea-4a35-a544-857397f21e20